This week’s theatre highlight is undoubtedly a ten-show run of Caryl Churchill’s Far Away, currently playing at the offbeat arts space Sitara Studio. It is presented by Little Productions, a theatre outfit founded by indie actor Kalki Koechlin, who stars in the play. It marks the directorial return of stage wunderkind Rehaan Engineer after an impasse of several years. The 78-year-old Churchill is a prolific British playwright, who has written 50-odd plays over 44 years. She is known for her genre-busting experimental works that come equipped with a powerful brevity and an uncompromising political tenor. So this particular outing certainly smacks of pedigree all around.
Perfunctory horror
The universe of Far Away (written in 2000) is characterised by the almost perfunctory horror of a war rumbling at a distance. As festering conflicts go, it is insidious and perennial, engulfing entire lifetimes. The main characters grapple with being insulated, willingly or otherwise, from a looming reality that is bizarre and chilling, and almost everyone and everything is caught up in its swirl. Like giant trees falling in an Amazonian jungle, or surgical strikes, we are always at a distinct remove from it. The play’s scenes are performed across the length of the venue, with seating on both sides. The actors often have large distances between them, which foreground the metaphors of alienation inherent in the material. Another important element is the prescient soundscape by Naren Chandavarkar ( Ship of Theseus ). With its discordant harmonics and forbidding accents, it is certainly of a piece with a dystopian narrative.
Tales of childhood
The innocent at the centre is the character essayed by Koechlin. As a child, she is a fawn-like creature bewildered by genocidal acts she may have witnessed in strangely defamiliarised settings. Sheeba Chaddha plays her aunt and spends her time obfuscating the obvious. Their first scene together sets up the idea that things are not quite right in this world, but it’s played out in a manner that doesn’t work with its ambiguities. Koechlin’s awkward child is not quite as suggestible as one might hope, while Chaddha, whose quirkiness is otherwise always eminently watchable, wears her diabolism on her sleeve. This is not about the writing and what it reveals (since it does reveal everything eventually). It is about how the tales we are told in childhood, especially the false ones, condition us in powerful ways. Yet, the hollowing out of this subtextual universe is unnerving, because it is accomplished in this very early scene.
Later, much more winningly, Koechlin blossoms into a young ingénue at a hat factory, still in possession of wallops of whimsy. Her comrade at this industrial space is played by Vivek Gomber as a man acutely aware of how there are no harmless professions, and how there is always a whistle to blow. Their sparring is mildly flirtatious, and mildly competitive, as they toil at their work stations creating showpiece hats. The best hats end up in a museum, the rest are incinerated while still on the bodies that wear them. In one scene, society’s ‘basket of deplorables’, played by a dozen actors kitted out in overblown headwear, are paraded out to Chandravarkar’s ominous score. The hats are so grotesquely artless that they end up as meaningless props, and sullen actors trudging along in the dark bring us no closer to the conspiracies in which we are all complicit.
Much later, Koechlin mellows into a woman in the grips of a pallid melancholia. In a final scene that features the play’s most challenging writing, Chaddha comes into her own, as she and Gomber engage in an entertaining game of ‘who’s on our side and who’s on theirs’. Ants, mosquitoes, Portuguese car salesmen, deer and crocodiles are all apportioned across an imagined partisan divide. Although Chaddha is never satisfyingly conflicted, she still comes across as a poignant figure of resignation. Gomber’s earnestness doesn’t amount to a nuanced portrayal, although at the work station, his character held the promise of a revolution. In the end, he is just a mannequin that could fall limp at any moment, and he does, as the trauma of conflict catches up with him. The material calls for a constant negotiation, an aliveness. Yet, the actors are given to languidly paced conversations. This is a stylistic choice that doesn’t always work, and telling phrases are often frittered away. Koechlin holds together the play’s denouement in a final monologue, but her luminescence aside, the weight of her character seems undermined in a scheme that provides her no space to really breathe.
Dictated by the script
The sincerity on display and the utter lack of pretension certainly lend Far Away a quality that can still be cherished. Yet, what must be kept in balance is how much all of it services the play’s complexities. At its heart is the idea that things that are far away are still uncomfortably near. We are irrevocably caught up in that we are most insulated from. What is unsaid provides the scope for possibilities that this production doesn’t seem to have any time for. There is no grander design or vision brought to it by Engineer who seems content to be dictated by the script. In the end, it remains a play that bears the cold veneer of art most certainly, but none of its frisson.
Far Away, Sitara Studios, Lower Parel, till October 16, 5 p.m., 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. See insider.in
The sincerity on display and lack of pretension lend Far Away a quality that can still be cherished
